Turbolinux 10F: Turbolinux is Alive and Well - page 2

Rediscovering Turbolinux

April 4, 2005

By
Bill von Hagen

Nowadays, installers are graphical and "just work," so I'm not going
to spend too much time discussing it. Installing Turbolinux 10f was
easy and painless on the two systems where I tested it, vanilla boxes
featuring a 3.3-GHz P4 and and a 1.7-GHz Athlon, respectively.
Turbolinux comes on three CDs and uses its own installer, known as
Mongoose, which is reminiscent of Red Hat's Anaconda installer.

As you'd expect from a Linux distribution targeted for the Asian
market, the installer first prompts you for the language that you want
to use during installation: English, Japanese, Simplified Chinese, or
Traditional Chinese. This isn't going to make it popular in Europe,
but luckily English was an option (or else this review would be very
short indeed).

Next, the Turbolinux installer offers three installation options:
Standard, Turbo, and Upgrade. The Turbo install option pre-selects
"appropriate" defaults and requires little use interaction, while the
Standard install provides a nice checklist for each installation step
and lets you customize the installation to suit your tastes and
hardware. The standard install also provides you with three disk
partitioning option: automatic, TFDisk (Turboxlinux' own disk
partitioning tool), and Loopback, which enables you to install
Turbolinux into an existing DOS/Windows partition. I didn't have a
Windows box with enough disk space handy, so I didn't test this, but
the idea is certainly cool.

The TFDisk tool tool me a little while to get used to, but was quite
powerful. Some of its options seemed almost too flexible--for
example, it supports a huge range of support partition types,
including NFTS and PPC PrepBoot. NTFS is not something that I would
use for a boot partition given the early 2.6-vintage kernel used by
Turbolinux, and PPC PrepBoot is primarily irrelevant on x86 boxes
unless you're sharing drives with a PPC box. However, Turbolinux used
to have a PPC distribution, so perhaps this is an artifact.

After partitioning the disk and answering a few other questions, you
can choose between various default system types with associated
package sets: Standard Workstation, Development Workstation, or
Everything. "Everything" is always my choice on modern systems, since
disk space is cheaper than my time if I find that I neglected to
install some package that I wanted to use.